My First Impressions of Chinese

Studying languages in any medium can be a very intimidating endeavorer. At Trinity University, we offer many different languages including Spanish, Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Russian, and next year we add Arabic to the list. As a freshman, I am currently taking my second semester of Chinese 1 as well as various Spanish classes. The purpose of this post is to describe my initial days and thoughts of beginning my formal education of the Chinese language. 

As a teenager, I spent three summers with my Taekwondo team training in Beijing and Taiwan. While I picked up many phrases and even was able to write some characters, I had no idea about how the language worked, but because of my continuing travels to Asia I had a strong desire to learn. 

When picking colleges to apply to during my junior year, I wasn't really sure about what I would want to study, let alone major in. There wasn't a specific subject I was good in, except Spanish. Throughout Junior High and High School I had taken four years of Spanish as well as traveled to Puerto Rico twice and a school trip to Spain. Thats when I realized I wasn't a math, history, art or science person, but rather, a language person. I decided to set my sights on Chinese, and when I attended College fairs, I looked for schools with exceptional Chinese Programs. When I told the admissions officer behind the Trinity table my interest, I was informed that Trinity had the 2nd best Chinese Program in the State of Texas. 

Obviously I was excited to start learning Chinese, I was extremely intimidated and nervous. My biggest fear is that I would be dropped into a classroom with an native-Chinese teacher who would expect me to know how to speak, write, and read right away! While this sounds stereotypical, I was worried I wouldn't fully understand a native-speaker and learning aspects of the language would get lost in translation. 

On my first day of class, I walked in to find Dr. Stephen Field. He is a white male from West Texas... exactly what I was NOT expecting. Basically, Dr. Field told the class that if he could learn Chinese fluently, then all of us could for sure. This gave me a new-found hope for my upcoming challenges within Chinese, and I wasn't nervous anymore. For the rest of the year, any time I got discouraged and confused, I reminded myself that once upon a time Dr. Field was learning the language just like I was. 

Basically, my point of this post is to inform anyone who is interested and yet intimidated of taking a new and foreign language at Trinity to know that all the professors, especially Dr. Field, are there to teach you and help you.